Others write about dead men walking
instead I am a walking flower, bright
turquoise white and yellow, edged
in black geometric-patterned silk, a button
on strands of colored thread hooked
around my throat. I am a flower walking
among roses and drought-loving vinca
small white fairy flowers, clematis
thickly covering a cement block wall.
I am turquoise against Russian blue sage
yellow against Klondike cosmos
thick-stemmed and covered with bees
in the gardens planted to replace lawn.
I am walking into the seven thirty dash
for work that follows the shortcut
up Woodcrest, a narrow road over Red
Mountain and down into Homewood.
I am backing the car out of the driveway
as pain shoots through my thigh,
the car still moving into a sharper acuity
of what is caught at the hem of my dress,
the kind of bee others all day will tell me
never stings, boring anyway into my thigh
a red welt forming under patterned silk
Linda Casebeer lives in Birmingham, Alabama where she is a medical education researcher. She has published a collection of poems: The Last Eclipsed Moon, from Cherry Grove Collections, as well as poems in Slant, Earth’s Daughters, Chest, Hospital Drive. Publications in anthologies include Knowing Stones, and The Light of Ordinary Things among others. Linda and her husband have recently published a novel, The Canary Room.
